


her hands made cathedral

by orphan_account



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Gen, Guilt, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-07-29 20:59:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7699129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“I know you mean well.”</i><br/>McCree lets Angela treat his arm, near the end of it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	her hands made cathedral

It’s like Sunday confession, he thinks: visiting her. Angela’s ward feels as still and sterile as the white stucco churches he’d chucked all his guilts into, back in the day—like a handful of coins in the collection basket. He remembers nickels the shade of gunmetal, tinted with a red no padre could wash off. Angela wires the prosthetic in place, and he says, “The color suits me.”

Jesse flexes, watching the metal shudder and jolt and try to parse what his synapses want. “Don’t do that,” she chides, swatting at him with her clipboard. Then she twists up his arm in a way that makes him wince, her fingers ghosting over something on the underside.

“Sorry,” Angela says, belatedly.

You’d think she would have aged better than him, given what he does, but when she bends to fuss with the arm’s insides he can count the white strands in her hair. Jesse glances at the photo she has framed on her steel counter: of the team when they still pretended to be a team, instead of just two parts to the same beast—Overwatch being its pretty face, and he and Reyes the muddy claws.

(He doesn’t talk about his work. These days, they don’t talk about her work either. Their conversations unspool like a roll of barbed wire, giving him plenty of time to wonder how much give those categorizations—his job and hers—have to them. When he’d lost the arm, Angela had materialized on the Blackwatch helicopter like she’d been there all along, her coat washed blue-gray with the chopper’s lack of light.)

For the most part, Angela still looks as fresh as she does in that photo, recruited as part of a youth talent search that was probably never legitimate, given his criminal record. But when she frowns—the way she’s doing now—Jesse glimpses wrinkles feathering at her eyes and mouth. Tiredness etches them fresh at every opportunity.

And these days there are a lot of opportunities.

“I’m almost done,” Angela says. She pats his shoulder. “Thanks for keeping so still, Jesse. You won’t believe how poorly some of my other patients have taken their limb loss.”

The way her brow creases, he knows exactly who she’s talking about. “My mama taught me to show some gratitude, is all,” he says. He doesn’t say anything else, because his mama also told him to keep his trigger finger faster than his head and his head a hell of a lot faster than his mouth. And because she would hit him again—she’s protective of Genji like that, despite everything.

He remembers the one time he’d seen Angela truly angry, as in Old Testament anger. He’d caught at the end of a seven-hour operation, still hurting from the shit Reyes and Morrison had saddled her with after this latest emergency—nervous half-jokes like  _violations of bodily autonomy_ and _brujería_. Throwing up her still-gloved hands, she had flecked the ceiling with the green of whatever it is Genji bleeds.

“—keeps trying to be _self-destructive_ ,” she’d yelled. “As if I can’t fix everything he does to himself.”

“Honey, you fixing him might just be the problem,” he didn’t say.

“Reyes is scared of you—superstitious, I guess. Crosses himself every time he steps into the ward,” he didn’t say.

“I know you mean well,” he didn’t say.

Something in the prosthetic suddenly clenches on its own, doubling him over. He looks up, and there it is—the ward’s fluorescents throwing a false halo from her hair. 

“I’m starting to think you were lying about being almost finished,” Jesse hisses.

“It’s part of a good bedside manner, I’m afraid.” One corner of her mouth ticks upward, delicate and minute as scalpelwork. His good arm reaches out, thinking to push up the other corner and coax a laugh from her like they’re still teenagers pretending to be heroes, like any minute Reyes will smack the back of his head and tell him to quit flirting. He misses the way she’d smiled in that photo or in the days when he first taught her to play Texas hold-em, when she actually could bluff. They still play a little—just the two of them and occasionally Fareeha. Though the kid’s heart is never in it. Half the time he flips her cards over for her, and she just apologizes and drifts away from the table, looking for her mother’s ghost in other places.

“I’m worried about her,” Angela always says, because she never seems to make time for her own grief. No wounds on her except the ones she gives herself.

Guilt can be as deadly as the sheriff’s hound at your back, or it can be the rosary you turn over in your bunk in the dead of night—useless, but still something you’re obliged to carry around. He remembers the morning after the surgery—waking up with her by his side and a godawful itch where his limb once was. “We had to amputate,” she’d told him. Said it all funny, too: stiff and quick and full of flat cheer.

Then she’d started crying, curling into herself like a plant that’s gotten too much sunshine and not enough rain. She’d smelled like antiseptic and dirty pennies. She was still wearing her stained scrubs. 

There was a confession in that, too.

His arm drops to his side just as the other one starts working. Wiggling his new fingers, Jesse says, “You’re an angel, doc.” It’s an old joke of theirs, one the edge in his voice butchers—but what else can he do? He needs her to smile again, fanning out a set of cards that are just as shitty as his, as badly as he needs her to pretend that she’s never heard of Blackwatch. Or that she wouldn’t have turned his body into something the color of gunmetal, had it been him dying on her operating table.

But Angela just pushes her chair away from his, the exhaustion suddenly evident in her distance. She stares down at her clasped palms the way Genji sometimes does, or the way Jesse himself had done after his first kill, when the blood on them curled into steam in the cold desert night—like she doesn’t quite know what her hands are, what they might yet do.

**Author's Note:**

> blizzard's canon timeline gives me hives but i tried to make it work :)


End file.
